I wish I could say it’s been a strange week, but it’s been very much in keeping with where I am now.
I was meant to be heading out with a friend during the week for my birthday. They were going to get me into some place they have membership for, and it would’ve been nice to catch up and I’ve never been to this particular well known London venue. I wasn’t desperate to go and that’s simply down to being someone that is never too downcast at some social function falling through rather than any other reason. But these are the kind of things I need to be doing. Engaging with friends, going out for something other than a run or a gig.
The reason it fell through is down to the ongoing fallout because I told them I wouldn’t welcome any more voice notes. I’ve thought about this some more and while maybe I could’ve put it a little better to them, I don’t think I’m wrong on this. I just think we are losing so much of what we had. Our phones have made us so lazy in many different ways. I get the WhatsApp thing. It can be a distraction and most of my groups are muted. I have about 4k unread messages from the Spanish family WhatsApp group which tends to feature a lot of religious iconographies. I only have one friend who texts, and I’ve come to dread the texts because normally these days, the SMS is reserved for stuff from official bodies, the NHS and such, rarely offering good news. I wish we had one universal messaging system, and we all knew where we stood.
WhatsApp has certainly made us lazier when it comes to correspondence. In the space of thirty years, I’ve gone from being someone writing letters to friends, proper old school letters, a man born slightly out of their time (not having a house phone until 1990, it was the only way I could stay in touch with many friends and the habit continued even after I’d got the house phone in September 1990), to emailing my way through the late nineties until WhatsApp, at least in my life, became a thing I had to accept around 2018. I do feel that once I let WhatsApp into my life, I was dumbing down to some extent but I also accept it’s very useful in the case of family emergencies, of which there have been a couple this week, including right now.
I try to limit the technology I use. To have all these various avenues that you can be contacted by is just overwhelming. But to double down on the anti voice note stance, I’d like to go over why I think these are taking us further away from where we should be.
The phone, the house phone, it used to be a huge thing in our lives, right? Believe me, I spent my childhood and teens in public phone boxes because we never had one. Then when we finally got the phone, like in most homes, you’d have the phone in the hallway and a phone call, whether making one or receiving one, was a big event. You made the time for that call, and you’d enjoy the chat.
In the late nineties, ’98 being a big take up in the history of mobile phones, there was the excitement of using your mobile, particularly the entitlement to however many free minutes you had a month which was a new thing. But in the space of a generation and a bit, we’ve gone from all that, to voice notes. And what is the voice note when you break it down? Well, it’s an approximation of a phone call, except you’re not talking with each other, you’re talking at each other. It’s two people, too lazy to even write and email or a message, who now take the easy option of sending a vocalised note rather than actually engaging with that friend in a phone call. Can this be right? I don’t think so. Yes, I’ve been guilty of sending them too. It was a habit that for me began during the pandemic. My excuse was I was isolating alone for 13 months, and I felt so cut off that I welcomed any chance to interact with friends, even in that new form. But I never thought it would become an established form of contact and as someone so cut off from everyone now, I know it adds nothing to my life. I would rather have proper contact with friends. I don’t think the voice note gives you that. And how many voice notes will we all send each other before we actually do that thing people used to do, phone each other up or even meet up. As a friend once said to me, human contact is nourishing.
Yesterday was another eventful day in Brixton. I have seen major incidents there every day this week, at close hand in a couple of instances. The area is absolutely on its behind, the worst I’ve seen it since living through the riots as a boy. I was having a banking review with this woman, not much older than me, and in the preamble to the review, we exchanged a few nuggets of personal information, nothing too revealing, age related, touching on mental health, until it became a bit more, and in a long conversation, reminiscent of 2010/11 when I experienced a profound time of deep change after a run of difficult to overcome setbacks, I probably found myself being quite candid about where I was in my life. This person told me about their partner and how their life changed during the pandemic when their job ended. They existed within the bubble afforded to them by their job, were in their comfort zone and became very depressed when they found themselves without work. And now, a couple of years on, they’ve turned things around, doing the kind of rewarding job I’d be happy to do that might help me rebuild my collapsed writing career. It’s the kind of role that, if you’re a little self-absorbed, as writers can be, give you some wider perspective on life and I’ve long been aware of that. Everyone has their problems, but I think if you do a job that has such a positive impact on any particular community, you are giving something back and in a big way. You can take inspiration from those people you are working with every day and learn to see the world in a different way.
The woman told me, and I have been negative about aspects of the digital age just in this very post, that perhaps I should consider looking at apps that would help me to engage with people. I’m not talking about dating apps here. I’ve never used them, never will though I appreciate for some people, that route works, and they’ve found the right person, but it’s not for me. I’m talking about things like say, off the top of my head, book clubs, writing circles, so on and so forth. Something that might help me engage with like-minded people.
I then received a package this morning, thinking it was another birthday gift from my always too generous sibling but instead it was a gift from this woman. It was kind and humbling and I emailed them right away to tell them so. Sometimes it’s strangers that can set you on the path to making some change, though I shouldn’t need someone to tell me these things would be a good idea in the first place that could help me break this lonely life I’ve ended up with.
I then went out for a run. This has been the first week when I’ve been able to go back to the three runs a week because of the foot injury. The weather was horrible. Normally I’m in shorts by March but this winter, while not a miserable one really, has been prolonged. The steep climb at the start of my route always taxes me but I got through it, and it was nice to run where I didn’t have to run through lines ahead of a comedy gig. I always make sure I never gig on my birthday. I don’t want to risk having a bad show and always remembering it because it happened on my birthday. One mistake I made years ago around this time is paying for my website launch because it means that every year since then, I always know my birthday = hefty website annual renewal fee. That will delay the overdue eye test and new prescriptions. I have to be grateful. I spent most of my life with great eyesight, the classic writer’s longsightedness aside. To be as blind as bat the last couple of years without specs, it’s a strange thing. I don’t know how the bespectacled do it.
Hopefully I can continue to run three times a week until the steroid jab at the end of May, now booked in, that will keep me out of action for a week or two.
I had a decent couple of gigs this week. I’m at a new night in SW8 tomorrow which I’m looking forward to. The weird thing about the circuit, for me anyway, as someone who never went to university and broadened the range of people I know, is that I’ve gotten to know probably hundreds of other comics, either by name or face. Some you get to know fairly well, others you recognise them, and you have a little chat. As someone that doesn’t like to function in cliques, particularly creative cliques, I am never going to make friends easily, but I have made a couple of friends on the circuit. It’s like any world you move through. You’ll meet lots of nice people and the odd dicks too, and you try to focus on the positives.
Tickets: bit.ly/3JlO0Fj
My uncle has had a bad week and I’m currently writing this from my aunt and uncle’s kitchen, waiting to go and pick up his prescription after the GP had to come out and see him again. He’s such a tough guy and has now surpassed the hospital’s initial survival prognosis for him. If I ever go through what he is having to battle, I won’t put up half the fight he has, I know that. He’s dealt with his bad hand in an incredibly stoical way. He’s very old school. It is hard to see him as he has been this week, and we are all just making sure we spend as much time as we can with him and savour these moments. I’ve been very lucky to grow up in this community and to have him and my aunt in my life from day one.
The café will have to wait until tomorrow perhaps. It’s the first birthday in maybe the last 15 where I never managed to get there.
I’m hoping now to get back home at a decent enough time to finish recording this week’s episode of When Shorts Were Short. I hope you guys have had a good week.
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